iOS has a number of measures built in to make brute-force guessing difficult, including an optional setting that disables the phone after 10 wrong passcode entries and a mandatory delay between passcode entry attempts (which, for later phone models, grows in length with each failed attempt). The FBI believe that Farook turned the “ten strikes and you’re out” setting on the iPhone on, which is why they’re demanding that Apple provide a workaround.

Corbató’s Law

The FBI/Apple situation may have left you asking questions, but one question you might not have asked is “Who came up with the idea of using passwords to secure access to files?” With computer science being such a young field — the formal definition of computable didn’t appear until the 1930s, and the oldest programming languages are from the 1950s — many of its pioneers are still alive. This is the case with the lock-files-with-passwords creator, Fernando J. Corbató. In a 2014 interview with the Wall Street Journal, he said that the password system has become unmanageable these days.

Corbató has made many other contributions to our field that we benefit from even today, including:

Simply put, what Corbató is saying is that every day, you only have so many lines of code in you. The corollary to Corbató’s Law is that for maximum productivity, you should use a programming language that lets you do things in as few lines as possible — a language that minimizes yak shaving.

Cartoons

The term “yak shaving” was first used in its programming sense at the MIT Media Lab around 2000, and likely comes from this episode of the ’90s cartoon series Ren and Stimpy:

…yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task.

Many programming languages require you to do some amount of yak shaving, but one notorious culprit is also one of the most popular: Java.

Kotlin

Here’s a simplified version of the dreaded class example you’re likely to find in a programming textbook: the Person class. It’s a data class — we’re really using a class as a structured record type, since Java doesn’t have any. This one has two fields that won’t change once instantiated: name, a string, and age, an integer value. Here’s the Java implementation:

The dreaded

Swift

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publicclassPerson{

private final Stringname;

private final intage;

public Person(Stringname,intage){

this.name=name;

this.age=age;

}

public StringgetName(){

returnname;

}

public intgetAge(){

returnage;

}

}

Here’s a KotlinPerson class that does everything that the Java Person class above does, but in one line as opposed to ten:

The not-so-dreaded

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data classPerson(val name:String,val age:Int)

Kotlin lets you specify a primary constructor on the very same line as the class keyword, and you can specify other constructors within the class with init. The val keyword defines name and age as write-once properties, which automtically provide getter methods. By annotating the class with the data keyword, you add all sorts of data class goodies like equals, hashCode, toString. Simply put, using Kotlin in place of Java means less yak shaving. I’m a little more interested in Android development now.

For “Get Your Game On”, my recent presentation at the Tampa iOS Meetup, which I run with mobile designer extraordinaire Angela Don, I put together a “Frogger”/“Crossy Road”-style game. I’ve continued tweaking it and have got the basic game mechanics up to the point where I’m pretty pleased with how they’re working. Now comes the hard part: all the polish, which may take a while. Here’s what it looks like on the iOS simulator — it runs a lot more smoothly on an actual device:

I’ve also taken the basic game code from the “Cookie Crunch” tutorial on Ray Wenderlich’s site, updated it to work with Swift 2 (it’s written for Swift 1.2, and won’t work in current Swift without some tweaking) and to make it more my own, and turned it into a game for Aspirations Winery, which I’m hoping to release soon. It won’t make me any money, but it’ll help fatten my App Store portfolio, and it’s already landed me lots of free wine:

And finally, on the Android front, I’ve been giving Kotlin a try. If Java drives you crazy and have wished for am open source, Swift-like language for Android development, the folks at JetBrains (the people behind the so-much-better-than-Eclipse Android Studio) have created the Kotlin programming language, and it’s so much more nicer to program in. There’s so much less “yak shaving”:

It’s happening today only — Wednesday, February 10, 2016 — but if you’ve got a Google Account, they’re offering 2 GB of free additional space on your Google Drive, just for double-checking the security on your account. Who these days can’t use an additional 2 GB of online accessible-anywhere storage space and the peace of mind from an account whose security credentials are up to date?

Your recovery information. This is used in those hopefully-rare cases where Google detects suspicious activity on your account and wants to reach you or when you’ve forgotten your login credentials.

Your connected devices. You’ll be presented with a list of devices connected to your Google account, and if you see any you don’t recognize, you can take steps to fix the problem.

Your account permissions. You’ll see a list of applications, sites, and devices that have permission to access your Google account. You can disconnect any that you don’t want to let into your Google account.

Tonight, as part of Tampa Bay Startup Week,Anitra and I will be helping the people from the coding school The Iron Yard Tampa Bay with their Hour of Code event! It’s an hour-long training session where kids ages 8 – 12 and teens ages 13 – 17 can get a quick, fun introduction to coding with the help of Rey and BB-8 from The Force Awakens and Princess Leia and R2-D2 from the original trilogy.

Here’s a quick video intro to what the Star Wars Hour of Code’s all about, courtesy of Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ producer Kathleen Kennedy and Rachel Rose, lead engineer for Star Wars’ animation and creature development team…

The programming interface that Hour of Code participants use is delightfully simple and fun. They drag and drop “blocks”, which represent calls to functions, to move the droid characters like BB-8 and R2-D2 around, arrange them into sequences which function as programs, and then click the “Run” button to see if their code worked.

It starts off with the simple task of moving BB-8 towards a single piece of scrap metal:

Click the screenshot to see it at full size.

…but about a dozen lessons later, you’re writing considerably more complex stuff that includes concepts like variables, branches, and loops, and changing droid characters:

Click the screenshot to see it at full size.

If you can make it to tonight’s Hour of Code…

If you’d like to have your kid or teen participate in tonight’s event, go to Tampa Bay Startup Week’s event schedule and sign up for the appropriate event. You’ll need to bring a fully-charged laptop (and it’ll be a good idea to bring its power cord) or tablet with working wifi and browser in order to work on the code. It can run Windows, Mac OS, Linux, iOS, or Android — as long as it’s got a relatively recent browser and can connect wireless to the internet, it’ll work for this class.

It’s that time of year again: Tampa Bay Startup Week! The tech/entrepreneurial event, which this year runs from today, Monday February 8th, through Friday, February 12th, is focused on bringing techies, creatives, and entrepreneurs together to bring them together, provide ideas and inspiration, and help grow the city’s self-starter business scene.

There will be all sorts of activities this week worth checking out, from presentations on technologies such as the Internet of Things, cryptocurrency, and mobile design, to business mentoring, networking, and even an opportunity to get a new headshot for your LinkedIn profile, to fun “intro to programming” events for kids, to mingling, networking, and enjoying the city’s excellent craft beer. Be sure to check out the Tampa Bay Startup Week page, follow the Tampa Bay Startup Week and organizer @thatgirlallie’s Twitter feeds, and come on down and take part!

The practical use of such research, as this article’s headline suggests, is that it’s a way to counter workarounds like VPNs, that people use to access streaming video services that aren’t available in their regions or countries. What the article fails to mention is that this technology will also find willing customers in repressive regimes that like to monitor, control, and limit their citizens’ access to the internet and information.

As my friend Sean Galbraith put it, “He’s going to be very popular in some awful places.”

I’m surprised that Abdou consented to a non-anonymous interview, but it’s quite possible that he thinks he is, in the words of Silicon Valley, making the world a better place, and he may not have been in a social situation where he’s had to answer the question “So what is it that you do?”.